


cheep and twitter twenty million loves

by mitsein, seinmit



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alt-Right Tweets, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, An Old Person Learns to Meme, Any Day Bucky Isn’t Getting Electrocuted by Nazis Is a Great Fucking Day, Bucky Is So Tired of This Shit, Character Does Not Understand Why They Suddenly Have a Cult, Coffee, Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Goat Herder Bucky Barnes, Otherwise Endgame Compliant, Steve doesn't go back, Twitter, Wakanda (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 03:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20284531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitsein/pseuds/mitsein, https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: nobody:literally nobody:bucky barnes: the blue check isn't all it is cracked up to be.Shuri guides Bucky through the wilds of the internet, which inspires him, as it does us all, to both joy and rage. Bucky learns what it really means to retire.





	cheep and twitter twenty million loves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Charientist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charientist/gifts).

> The "An Old Person Learns to Meme" tag is doing double duty for both Bucky and the author. This fic will date very quickly, but I hope it works even if all the silly details aren't totally _au courant_. 
> 
> Thank you, Kimra, for your amazing beta and reassurance. 
> 
> Warning: at one point in the fic, Bucky reads through a bunch of alt-right tweets, including some explicitly white supremacist and anti-Black language. Wakandans, in particular, are referred to in racist ways.
> 
> The title is from [The Princess: O Swallow ](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45381/the-princess-o-swallow%22), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Mostly because I thought it was funny to use a totally out of context use of the word "twitter" from a Great Western Poet.

After—well, just _After_, Bucky went back to Wakanda. In the catastrophic aftermath of Thanos, things like his war-criminal past essentially slipped the globe’s notice, so he could have gone anywhere. He even checked on that, reaching out to Steve and T’Challa, both of whom were making themselves indispensable in the effort to rebuild civilization out of the ashes of the mess it had been for the last five years and the mess that came with the return of all those who had disappeared.. Steve told him that he had already taken care of it, that Bucky had been given whatever pardon he needed to get on with life. 

T’Challa told him he was free to go, but also: he was free to stay. 

Bucky decided to stay. He liked this home, on the outskirts of Wakandan territory. He wanted to get to know his goats—again—the new goats, the ones that were five years older than he remembered, and the goats that had popped back into existence at the same time as him, who still looked startled after their metaphysical adventure. He understood how they felt. 

Shuri was pleased that he stayed. She showered him with little gifts and attention, all given with a mix of mockery and affection. 

“Old white man,” she said, pushing open the flap that served as his door, “I’ve got something for you.”

Bucky scrambled a little bit. He was decent—just sitting around reading a paperback that Steve had left him last time he visited—but he felt self consciously like he should cover up. He pulled his shawl up over his stump even though she had probably seen it more than he had at this point.

She snorted at the book in his hand. “Paper. You know, that tech is even older than you? We can do better, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Please, stick with ‘old white man’,” he said. 

He set the book down and pulled himself to his feet, watching her fingers twitch to help him, but he had her well trained at this point not to help unless he asked for it. 

“What brings the gift of your presence, princess?” he asked, affecting a debonair attitude that always made her smile. “Especially given the, uh, damp.” 

It was raining outside. She had an elaborate shawl over her head and a giant high-tech forcefield-styled umbrella in one of her hands, but he knew she took the risk of wet hair extremely seriously. 

“I made something for you,” she said, bouncing up on her toes a little bit. She drained the dregs of her coffee-milkshake-drink—he wasn't sure she'd ever be over that new Starbucks—and reached into the pouch at her hip to take out a tablet, encased in bright purple. 

He took it from her and did not comment on the color—that would just encourage her. And anyway, it was cheerful.

“Princess,” he said. “I know you want me to be able to keep up with your ‘memes,’ but you already gave me one of these and I hate it.” 

She rolled her eyes. “You sound more authentic speaking Xhosa than saying that word, it’s just embarrassing. And I made some changes for you. Open it up!” 

He sighed a little and flipped open the cover: It looked exactly the same as the other one—an empty black sheet of glass. He raised his eyebrows. 

She grabbed it from him, predictably. 

“Here, let me show you,” she said. 

She pressed down on one edge and a slim pen popped out with a soft _snick_ sound. 

“First, I programmed the interface so you wouldn’t have to use a keyboard, if you don’t want to. You can use this!” she said, brandishing the pen at him. “You can pretend it’s one of your journals, while still living in this century.” 

Despite himself he was intrigued and reached for the pen. It didn’t have any real nib—just a soft point—but it had the weight and feel of a ball-point. 

“_And_,” she said. “If that wasn’t enough, look at this.” She sat down in a cross-legged heap and set the tablet on the ground, tapping it so the screen lit up. Then, with her right hand, she made a quick wave above it. 

Bucky was suddenly standing in color and light, hovering over the ground. From this angle, things were strange and uninterpretable shapes. Shuri reached out and tugged his ankle until he moved around behind her. From that new perspective, there was a hologram of the homepage of the Birnin Zana Ukhanyiso, the biggest news source in the country . 

“What fresh nonsense has Steve Rogers done lately, Hal?” she said, chipper. The image changed from T’Challa’s face to Steve’s. Steve was trying to look very serious, but he landed somewhere near constipated. A not unusual expression these days. 

“He should really go back to the beard,” she said, musingly. “Hal, text Captain Rogers and tell him that there is a Wakandan consensus that he looks better fuzzy.” 

“What? Shuri!”

She shrugged. “If he’s going to be a politician, he needs to know these things. Anyway, you aren’t experienced enough in tech to know how cool that was, but it was really cool. I programmed in a level of natural language processing that would make Siri and Alexa weep. You can entirely navigate speaking normally. You won’t ever have to remember that it is called a you-are-el.” 

“So I can just talk to it?” Bucky said. Despite himself, he was pretty fascinated. “I should call it Hal?” 

“Yes,” she said. “Actually—Hal, add ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ to Bucky’s queue and remind him to watch it until he does.” 

“Hal,” he said, mostly ignoring her. “Could you play me the kind of music I should know if I want to pretend to be as cool as Princess Shuri?” 

A blippy beat started up, with the sound of cheers beyond it. 

“You have no idea how complicated what you just asked is,” Shuri said. “My genius is unappreciated. You just asked a tablet to discern my tastes well enough to figure out what I would be impressed by you knowing and it successfully came up with a reasonably deep Beyoncé cut off her latest live album. It didn’t go ‘Crazy in Love,’ that’s amateur hour. It went straight to ‘Formation.’” 

“I have no idea what you just said,” Bucky said cheerfully, “but I do like this. I could bop to this.” 

“Now that Tony Stark is dead this is undoubtedly the most excessively over-engineered AI on the planet,” she said. 

Bucky winced, despite himself. It wasn’t as if Stark and he were close, but Shuri had a tendency toward blithe callousness about the way the universe nearly ended not that long ago. 

She got back to her feet and patted his cheek briskly. “Now you have no excuse not to understand my texts. I made you a twitter and even got you a blue check. I expect a comprehensive report on what 30-50 feral hogs means by tomorrow morning.” 

He watched her fix her shawl and get ready to go back into the rain. 

“Hal, when is the rain going to stop?” 

“It won’t be more than an hour, Sergeant Barnes,” it said, in a dreamy vacant tone. 

Bucky winced. “Okay. Call me Bucky. And that voice is—it’s not good. Shuri?” 

She snickered at him. “Hal, switch to a generic British white man’s voice, please.”

“Certainly, Princess.” 

Bucky was relieved by the change. 

“Want to stay and show me around a little more?” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything important.” 

She grinned at him, took off her shawl, and sat back down, leaning over to snag a pillow. Then caught his shirt and tugged him down next to her. He went down easily.

“Okay, White Wolf. If you’re going to get started on Beyoncé, we need to educate you. Hal, play the video of Single Ladies.” 

Bucky settled in to learn some things, Shuri warm against his side.

* * *

The new tablet really was pretty great. Even without Shuri holding his hand, he found he could figure it out well enough. 

He found himself spending an unreasonable amount of time asking it questions and seeing what came up. When Shuri sent him a meme he didn’t understand, he could just ask the computer to explain. 

His tastes in what he found himself watching on his own flitted between the last couple decades, following strange chains of logic that he could barely retrace in the aftermath. There was so much out there. It was almost hard to fathom, that there was this much information in the whole world. He remembered watching the same movie over and over again, because he couldn’t imagine anything better than ‘The Invisible Man.’ Now, he could riff endlessly on a theme, going from YouTube video, to movie, to Buzzfeed article, and back again. 

It wasn’t long before he realized that voice she had used was actually HAL and that Shuri really did have a twisted sense of humor. 

“HAL, please tell Shuri that I would prefer it if she didn’t program her gifts with the capacity to kill me.” 

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Bucky,” the computer said, back in the original movie’s creepy voice. 

But his phone dinged with her response, not a minute later, so it apparently could. 

“I think you having a sense of humor kinda makes you scarier,” Bucky said, but it was mostly for show. There was something comforting about HAL not being a vacant tool for him to use—he found the alternative unsettling. 

He started listening to HAL’s designed playlists while he was hanging out with his goats, finding himself singing to them about old town roads and blurred lines. 

Before long he discovered porn and after clarifying with HAL that Shuri couldn’t actually track what he was viewing, he wasted many enjoyable hours in those parts of the internet. 

Given all that there was to discover it took him quite some time to actually check out Twitter and the account Shuri had made him. 

It was simple. His handle was apparently @theRealSergeantBarnes and all his bio said was, “saving the world since 1942.” He liked that. Somehow, without making a single tweet, he had fifty thousand followers. 

He only followed three people: Steve & T’Challa, both accounts run entirely by PR people, and Shuri—who was something of an Insta legend at this point and her fame had spilled over to Twitter. 

“HAL, what are people saying about me on Twitter?” he asked, casually. He popped a handful of salted dried corn in his mouth, not paying that much attention to the screen. 

“What variety of tweet would you like to hear about, Bucky?” HAL asked. “There are so-called thirst tweets, which are quite sexual, shitposting, which—“

“Believe me, I know what shitposting is. Shuri taught me that first,” Bucky said. 

HAL continued doggedly, “Wikipedia defines as aggressively and ironically poor quality content, or more substantive tweets about your history and political status?” 

Bucky paused. He had the strong sense that this was a bad idea, but now that he was so close to it, he couldn’t help it. 

“Tweets about my past, please.” 

“One of the most popular is from the user @pepetheoctopus and it reads, @therealSergeantBarnes was a Hero when he fought against Nazis and he was a Hero when he fought for Hydra. Proof the liberal propaganda about Insight is nothing but coup. #hailhydra.” 

Bucky froze, “That’s not a shitpost?” 

“No, Bucky. It seems to be very sincere.” 

His heart was pounding. “How many more are like that?” 

“Quite a few, Bucky. Your account is a very popular symbol among the far-right.” 

“Read me some more,” he said. His voice was hoarse. 

“@AnnCoulter tweeted: As @CaptainAmerica seizes more and more power, remember that even his old friend @theRealSergeantBarnes fought against him in his takeover of SHIELD. He thinks he’s above the law.” 

“@globalist_plot tweeted: The hunt for @theRealSergeantBarnes was a clear sign that the international regime cares more about its own power than the rights of American Citizens. The Cat King is asking us to sign away more rights—you could be Barnes next.” 

“@octo_otaku tweeted: libs should worry about the return of the #WinterSoldier. @theRealSergeantBarnes doesn’t listen to trigger warnings, he only pulls triggers. #hailhydra.” 

“@well_hydrated tweeted: we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. @theRealSergeantBarnes is going to help. #hailhydra.” 

“@orderispain tweeted: the enemy speaks of freedom and doesn’t care about dead children. ask yourself, where is @theRealSergeantBarnes and what have they done to him? #wethepeople #hailhydra.” 

“@88legs tweeted: it is disgusting to see these Wakandan monkeys pretend like they have civilization. @theRealSergeantBarnes was the #wintersoldier for a reason. intelligence dies in hot climates.” 

“Stop,” Bucky said, finally. “Jesus. Stop.” 

All his muscles were tense, like he was on the verge of a fight. Did everybody know about this? He scrambled to his feet, shutting off the tablet to tuck into a backpack and he got on his hover-bike to go to the palace. 

His mouth was dry and his head hurt. These were the people that were tweeting at him? This is what rose up in his absence from the public stage? He remembered, way back, that Steve always had to work to differentiate himself from those who wanted to use his image, with more or less success. He imagined that it was even harder nowadays for him. But he had never even dreamed that people would see the news calling him a war criminal, see the reports about his assassinations, and declare him some kind of fucked-up hero.

Bucky reached the palace quickly and went straight to Shuri’s lab. He ran his hand through his hair in a nervous gesture, knocking on the door frame before walking in. The tablet was back in his hand, because maybe he would need to show her. Maybe she didn’t know. 

“Bucky!” she said, sounding delighted. “Are you going to let me put your arm back on?” 

“Did you know that there are people who view me as a hero because of Hydra?” he asked, unable to let it lie a single second. 

She looked away for just a moment before bringing her eyes solidly back on his face. 

“Yes. People think all sorts of crazy things, Bucky,” she said. Her voice was atypically serious. “I could show you any number of tweets wishing Killmonger won and even some crazies who regret bringing back the people Thanos snapped. Here, try searching the hashtag #humansareparasites—“

“Shuri,” Bucky said. “I don’t care about that. What do I do?” 

“Nothing,” she said immediately. “Absolutely nothing. I know I taught you not to feed the trolls and these guys are definitely trolls.” 

“So I’m supposed to let them keep using me—using the Winter-fucking-Soldier like this? Let them keep _regretting_ the fall of Hydra?” he said. He raised his voice, which he tried not to do in general, but particularly not to Shuri. 

She stood her ground, eyes calm and a little sad. 

“You should tweet about your goats, if you want to. Maybe send silly messages to Steve. If you really want to, you can give your thoughts on politics—but I know you, Sergeant Barnes. You don’t really have thoughts on politics. Other than that, yes. There isn’t anything else you can really do,” she said. 

He was holding the tablet in his hand one moment and the next he smashed it against the wall. It made a very loud sound.

She jumped and her eyes opened wide. _Frightened._

He went still. He closed his eyes and pressed his palm over them, trying to control his breathing. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, after a long silence. “I shouldn’t lose my temper.” 

He heard her lean down and pick up the tablet. It was surely broken—he wasn’t wearing his metal arm, but he was still strong enough to break a flimsy piece of glass. 

He hated that he did that. He hated that he scared her, even for a moment. He honestly hated everything about this. 

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m going to go.” 

He turned around, away from her, before he let himself open his eyes. He barely breathed until he was all the way back in the village. Instead of going in his home, he hopped the fence that claimed to contain his goats and went to the corner, where a nanny goat was standing on top of a log, just because she could. She looked at him balefully and he sank down to sit next to her. He didn’t care he was sitting in the mud. He liked that he could smell the dirt and her animal scent. 

His breath was shaky for a long time.

* * *

He called Steve. 

“Bucky!” Steve said. He sounded delighted to hear from him, which was a nice feeling even accounting for everything. “I have no idea what you mean by saying you’re baby. And what’s that pink thing?”

Bucky laughed, but it sounded tired to his own ear. 

“Not important,” he said. “Do you know what people say about me on the internet?” 

“Bucky,” Steve said, in a totally different tone than before. “You shouldn’t google yourself. And people are _wrong._ You’re a hero. You’ve—”

“Yeah, to Nazis,” he said. “I’m a hero to Nazis and idiots. Twitter is just full of this stuff. I looked it up—they sell ‘Property of Hydra’ t-shirts. People put my face on signs and protest you, Steve.” 

There was a long pause. 

“I have seen some of that, yes,” Steve said, slow. “I didn’t think it was that common.” 

“Common enough, right? I mean, for fuck’s sake. I could take being hated for my crimes. It’s hard to stomach being loved for them,” he said. 

Bucky kept on having to consciously loosen his grip on the phone. He couldn’t break this, too. 

“Okay,” Steve said. “Okay, we can handle this. I’ll get the PR team on it. I think it’s not the sort of thing that you can do just once, but we can certainly start with a press conference. Twitter is a problem? I’ll get someone for your twitter.” 

Bucky felt nauseated. 

“Speeches,” he said, faintly. “I’d need to give speeches.” 

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve said. His voice was gentle. “That’s the way you tell people what you’re about. You tell them. You kind of have to do it a lot.” 

“Does it cause problems, for you?” he said. “I mean. More than the giant problems I caused a couple years ago.”

“No,” Steve said. “The right is always going to be an issue, but you’re not the only thing they rally around. And you aren’t _rallying_ them, so. Not to mention, most people really do think you’re a terrorist.” 

“Oh, good,” Bucky said. “Small blessings.” 

“We should try to attack that perception at the same time,” Steve said. “I’m sure we can come up with a strategy.” 

_A strategy._ For his public image. 

“Can I get back to you?” he said. “I think a goat is on my roof.” 

“Sure,” Steve said. “But, hey—Bucky. The people who matter know what you’re about. I’ve made sure of it. You’ve made sure of it.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But really, goat emergency, I have to—”

“Bye, Bucky,” Steve said. “Oh, and if Shen Yun ever hits Wakanda, you should really check it out. That was a great recommendation, thanks.” 

He hung up and laughed, helplessly. He couldn’t entirely tell how much Steve was trolling him back, but that was a pretty typical state in his life, even decades before anyone coined the word “trolling.” They weren’t always great at talking to each other, in this new millennium, but Steve always took Bucky entirely seriously when he wanted that and treated him like a dumb asshole when Bucky needed _that_. 

He wiped his eyes. They were wet.

There wasn’t a goat on his roof, but he went outside anyway. He sat down on the tree stump, for once free of perching goat, and watched the goats eat. They did a lot of eating. It was a straightforward life, for a goat. 

Beyond the paddock, Anathi tackled her sister Nceba to the ground and rubbed her face in the dirt. 

“Hey,” Bucky said. “Girls, quit. _Musayekaye._”

His bad attempt at Xhosa got their attention, Anathi sitting up on top of Nceba and turning to look at him. He stood up and walked over, stepping over the fence.

“_Yiyeke_,” she said, giggling. “That means stop it. _Yeka_ turns into _yiye_ and when you add _musa_ to the front it means no again. So what you said was for us not to stop it.”

She stuck out her tongue at him and pushed Nceba back down from where she was trying to get up. 

Bucky rolled his eyes and grabbed Anathi by the back of her shirt, hauling her off. 

“Well, _yiyeke_ then, you little punk. Goddamned irregular verbs,” he said. “I think I’ve figured it out and then another thing.” 

“Mostly you were just wrong, it’s not that weird,” Nceba said, still in the dirt. 

Bucky made his eyes go wide and put a look of outrage on his face. “You, too! _Umngcatshi._”

He’d learned the word for “traitor” pretty quick, waking up in the aftermath of Killmonger, but he still sounded like he was choking on his tongue when he tried to say that many consonants in a row. It sent them both to laughing, whatever they’d been fighting about forgotten. 

“Well, get on then,” Bucky said. “My ma would tell you to keep your noses clean, but I don’t know how to say that in Xhosa.” 

They ran off, Anathi dragging her little sister along by the hand. 

“Maybe my next goal should be to get Xhosa on Duolingo,” Shuri said from behind him. “I’m sure I’ve sent you some of those memes.” 

Bucky’s shoulders stiffened in surprise but then he relaxed, the sound of her voice a little like sinking into a hot bath. 

He turned around to face her, smiling, but when he saw her face he remembered what it looked like scared. 

“Princess,” he said, more formal than usual. “I want to say sorry again. I meant to send a note, but you beat me down here.” 

She clicked her tongue in clear dismissal, waving it away with one elegant hand. It was a sunny day, so her hair was up in a beautiful knot on top of her head and her loose top revealed her thin shoulders. 

“I’ve seen T’Challa throw worse tantrums after putting money on the wrong rhino,” she said. Bucky was skeptical—her brother was the very definition of implacable. 

“Anyway,” she said, walking right up to him and curling her fingers around his forearm. “Everyone gets mad. You stopped, right away. And you’re sorry.” 

“I really am,” Bucky said. It felt inadequate. Rage wasn’t an emotion the Winter Soldier felt, but he was so intimately aware of the violence his body could do and he had known plenty of men, over the years, who were driven to violence in anger. Her hand on his arm reminded him of how small she was, but he could not bring himself to push her away. 

She smiled up at him and he could see the skin crinkle around her eyes. Even as young as she was, she must have smiled as much as a significantly older woman. He spent maybe too long tracing the contours of her smile, but all that meant was that he saw it grow even warmer in real-time. 

“I fixed HAL for you,” she said. She didn’t move away, but she got the tablet out of her backpack. “I considered childproofing it as a joke, but I didn’t want to give you the impression I thought this was a characteristic response. You won’t ever find out again that you have a weird neo-Nazi cult.” 

He winced but took the cheerful purple tablet from her hand. He frowned at it, for a long moment, considering handing it back. He thought of the videos of screaming goats and silly cats, recipe gifs and surprised Pikachu, amateur porn with cute tattooed girls eating each other out and Postmodern Jukebox. He decided to keep it. 

At the same time, he didn’t really want to be someone the world had reason to verify. Not anymore.

It took him a while—he could feel Shuri watching him and restraining her urge to take over—but he deleted his twitter account. No more blue check. 

“There,” he said, turning it to face her. “I’m officially retired.” 

“Let’s celebrate,” she said. “I will buy you lunch.” 

She took him by the hand and led him back to Birnin Zana. Normally, they’d both take some sort of transport, but right now they walked. She didn’t let go of his hand. In a different life, he would have had a clearer idea of how to think about this, but right now he decided just to follow her lead. 

They didn’t talk, which was unusual. Shuri was always talking. They enjoyed the sunshine and the beautiful view. This was a lovely country. Bucky felt like he could stretch out, here. 

Shuri took them to her favorite restaurant and ordered for them both. He rolled his eyes a little, but accepted his fate. 

“Hey,” she said. “I want to put this on Insta, come sit next to me and we’ll get a pic.” 

He shifted around the table, sitting next to her in the booth close enough he could smell the spice of her perfume. 

“Smile,” she said. She made a ridiculous face into the camera and he smiled dutifully, unable to reach the heights of her cool. He thought of what he had deleted and what this photo meant—what the people on twitter were saying about her, her brother. What they thought he stood for. 

And he didn’t really want to make any great stands or make any great speeches. He didn’t want to be a symbol. But he plucked the phone out of her hand (once he was well sure she was done) and said: “Let me get one more for you.” 

He could hear the suggestive warmth in his own voice and he leaned in closer. Slow, giving her plenty of time to move away, if that was what she wanted. His face was a few inches from hers.

She didn't want to move away. Instead, she turned to him, eyes wide for nice reasons this time. He grinned, pleased with himself, and leaned in to kiss her in frame for the selfie. 

(It was a terrible photo. She made him take it again. And after that, she kissed him for real.)


End file.
